Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attends a meeting during the G20 Summit in Osaka on June 28, 2019. Getty Images photo
Canadians are used to peace and relative prosperity vis-à-vis the rest of the world and are occasionally naïve about it. They assume it is a regular state of human affairs in history rather than the exception.Canada
is an exception. That is in large part because the country sits “atop” North America and is surrounded by three oceans with one neighbour, the United States, a democracy and a superpower. That reality has always given serious pause to any other country that would think of invading Canada.During the height of the Cold War, for example, the Soviet Union was never going to invade Canada in the manner it did Czechoslovakia in 1968, or at all. There were easier targets to invade directly, or disrupt by proxy.I bring up history because a self-satisfied, cocoon-like approach to thinking leads some Canadians to be glib about our lucky position in the world. Such thinking also leads to flippancy about the critical usefulness of energy—oil and gas still being the bulk “share” of that concept—to Canada’s national interest.